September 23, 2016

Reasons why your e-commerce SEO is failing

One of the sad realities of selling products online is that in order to succeed at e-commerce, you need to be good at or have good SEO. According to PracticalCommerce, approximately 80% of e-commerce stores fail. There are varied reasons for this, from poor marketing to poor image quality but one of the standout reasons is a lack of traffic. This is where a lack of SEO comes in. Here are a few of the SEO related reasons that your e-commerce store is lacking traffic:

Architecture

There is a general rule that every page on your store should be within three clicks of the homepage. In fact, the fewer the better. Some stores place product pages too deep within the structure to get any link value or clicks.

URL

Another issue is URL structure. Long and nonsensical URL’s should be avoided. They should be readable and not too long. An example of a bad URL would be http://www.site.com/en-gb/productid/a/144534 while a good page URL would look like http://www.site.com/phones/galaxys7. The same goes for category pages which should look like http://www.site.com/phones.

Duplicate Content

This is one of the easiest SEO concepts to understand but is something nobody seems to take seriously. Most e-commerce stores have plenty of duplicate pages. A prime example would be getting to the same product page with more than one link. These should be checked and cleaned up as soon as possible.